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Collaborative Project to ‘Turbocharge’ Rice and Reduce World Hunger Enters Important New Phase

Tuesday, 05 January 2016
With nearly a billion people around the world living in hunger, boosting rice productivity is crucial to achieving long-term food security – particularly in areas such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where 80 percent of the food supply is provided by smallholder farmers.

A long-term collaborative project between 12 institutions in eight countries aimed at improving photosynthesis in rice is entering its third stage. This milestone marks another step on the road to significantly increasing crop yields that will help meet the food needs of billions of people across the developing world. The ultimate goal of the project is to ‘supercharge’ photosynthesis in rice by introducing more efficient traits found in other crops.

“This project will allow us to move in earnest with the engineering of improved photosynthetic performance in rice and the re-wiring of genetic circuits on a scale never before attempted in plants,” said Tom Brutnell, Ph.D., director of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.

Rice uses the C3 photosynthetic pathway, which in hot, dry environments is less efficient than the C4 pathway used in plants like maize and sorghum. If rice could be ‘switched’ to use C4 photosynthesis, it would theoretically increase productivity by 50 percent. Introduction of C4 traits is also predicted to improve nitrogen use efficiency, double water use efficiency and increase tolerance to high temperatures.

Jane Langdale, Professor of Plant Development in the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University who is leading the project said, “Over three billion people depend on rice for survival. Owing to predicted population increases and a general trend towards urbanization, land that currently provides enough rice to feed 27 people will need to support 43 by 2050.”

Robert Zeigler of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) described the project as ‘one of the great undertakings in plant sciences of the early 21st century’. Zeigler said, “Unless we can translate our work into meaningful products adopted by rice farmers worldwide, this will remain simply an academic pursuit. The unique partnerships that characterize this program should make sure this happens.”

The C4 Rice Project started in 2008 with funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Phase III of the project has been funded by a grant of over $4.5 million. The collaborating institutions are Oxford University, IRRI, Cambridge University, Australian National University, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Washington State University, University of Minnesota, University of Toronto, Heinrich Heine University, Max Planck Institute of Plant Physiology, Academica Sinica and the Chinese Academy of Sciences-Max Planck Partner Institute for Computational Biology.